Fanny and Stella- A Victorian Scandal

I finally got round to reading Neil McKenna’s “Fanny and Stella: The Young Men who Shocked Victorian England”- somewhat belatedly, I admit (it’s not easy to keep on top of a bad book habit in four languages).   This deals with a Victorian transvestite cause celebre.     In April 1870, Ernest Bolton (known to his many friends and admirers as Stella) and Frederick Park (Fanny) were arrested leaving the Strand Theatre (a notorious pick-up venue) after an uproarious night of drinking and attention-seeking behaviour in the box they were occupying with two young men.  Both were in full on Victorian female finery (Stella's on the left above, in a photo taken when they were doing some theatre work in Essex).   Over a year later the couple, accompanied by two male associates (with others charged in absentia) were tried on rather convoluted charges relating to conspiracy to commit sodomy.   After a six day trial all defendants were acquitted.  In the intervening year the investigation had seen both key defendants subjected to grossly intrusive and humiliating medical inspections to determine whether they bore on their bodies the traces of regular participation in anal intercourse, the impounding of large amounts of female clothing, photographs and correspondence stored in rented accommodation and the mobilisation of police forces as far away as the depths of rural Scotland in search of suspects.  The case had international ramifications- one of the accused in the Old Bailey dock was the US Consul General in Edinburgh.   It was also marked by the mysterious, possibly faked, death of a duke’s son and former MP.  The press lapped the whole affair up; broadside ballads and other ephemera were published to feed public interest.

McKenna’s account (written in a sometimes florid, even rather camp, style) sweeps the reader through the whole tangled tale.   He refers to the two stars of the show by their chosen female names throughout- and the choice of gender identifiers gets a bit confusing at times, though that also reflects the confusion of contemporary observers.   The case threw a spotlight on a lively and at times remarkably visible cross dressing scene in mid Victorian London.   This covered a very broad spectrum of activity.   At one end there was a world of more-or-less respectable and at times very public theatrical performances.  Stella, blessed with a very fine singing voice and radiant good looks, had star status, garnering positive reviews in regional newspapers for her stage appearances (her season in Scarborough with Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, the duke’s son mentioned above and her intermittent off-stage husband, brought the house down).  Fanny, less overtly pretty and requiring rather more aid from corsetry and the make up case to look her best, specialised in older feminine roles.   Somewhere below this lurked a world of quasi-private drag balls with suitable retiring rooms for ladies to fix their make up- or get up to more carnal pleasures- and rented rooms for part time ladies to store their clothes (Victorian frocks and underwear must have taken up an awful lot of space…) and entertain friends.

At the other end of the scale lay overt prostitution.  This sometimes overlapped with an active sub-culture of male prostitution, sometimes competed with the female variety (Stella first came to the notice of the police when she and another friend from the theatrical world were attacked by a group of female prostitutes who saw them as unfair competition).  McKenna is in no doubt that both his heroines engaged in remunerated sexual activity- and that their clients might not always have been aware that the lady of the night whose services they had procured was not quite what she seemed.  It was a world in which prostitutes very rarely ever stripped naked to service a client and where anal intercourse, though frowned on as an import from France, was nevertheless a common enough request even from straight male clients.  

McKenna has intriguing things to say about the practicalities of Victorian drag.  Stella, Fanny and their friends were beneficiaries of the then-new world of mail order shopping which made it much easier to acquire cosmetics or items of clothing without necessarily having to go into a shop (though nascent department stores also helped to make shopping a more anonymous process than in the days when a lady would have had to be measured up individually for a new dress).   He doesn’t mention shoes, which I suspect might have been much more of an issue than frocks (at a pinch girls could run up their own dresses on the new-fangled sewing machine even if dress patterns look surprisingly expensive on McKenna’s figures; producing your own shoes would have been a lot harder). It may have been an advantage that fashionable female hairdos in the late 1860’s were heavy on artificial hair extensions, meaning that suitable braids and the like were readily available and no lady’s hair looked entirely natural.  The downside was that hairdos took a lot of assembly.  A girl wanting to go out for a night on the town would generally acquire assistance in getting ready (this was an era when servants were to be found a remarkably long way down the social scale), though it’s gratifying to find that girls generally helped each other out in this area.   There were other problematic areas. Clothes took a lot of upkeep in a world without effective washing machines and there are some suggestions that Stella and Fanny’s outfits looked far more impressive in gaslight than in the cold light of day. Unwanted hair was obviously a problem too; electrolysis lay decades in the future and plucking only got you so far in any reasonable time frame.   Corsetry helped a good deal in attaining a suitably shapely figure but might need supplementing; McKenna mentions rather gruesome-sounding breasts made out of animal innards (I can’t see those ever coming back into fashion even amongst the most organically minded contemporary t-girl) though Stella and Fanny seem to have used lots and lots of padding to judge from what the police took into custody.

And dabbling in prostitution had its own hazards in a pre-antibiotic age- Fanny eventually died young as a result of inadequately treated syphilis.

The book is a thoroughly engaging read and McKenna’s sympathy for his heroines is clear (especially Fanny, who does come across as the nicer of the two, much less high maintenance and demanding than her adoptive sister Stella even if she did slide into Lord Arthur’s bed when he wearied of Stella’s naggings- though I feel McKenna is a bit unfair to her about her looks- she looks pretty sexy and desirable in the photo below) 

.   

It does have some shortcomings.   Some of his literary references are a bit shaky (Dickens’ Mr Gradgrind is not a factory owner).  The precise order of events is sometimes rather hard to work out.   McKenna is also inclined to present what must surely be his own speculations on his characters’ subjectivities as fact (neither Stella nor Fanny wrote their memoirs, after all, and we can only guess at how they saw themselves).  When it suits his story he sometimes takes at face value evidence from individuals whose credibility was trashed by the defence in the Old Bailey trial.  

He also under-examines some of the mysteries surrounding the case- not least why it was brought in the first place.   As McKenna points out, it was not all that rare for Central London magistrates to find themselves sitting in judgement on men who’d been pulled in by the police while out on the streets in drag.   They normally got off with a modest fine for breach of the peace and a slapped wrist.   Fanny and Stella, it rapidly emerged, had been under surveillance for days if not weeks before they were arrested by a team of detectives in the Strand Theatre. They were clearly an above averagely noisy and visible pair but why the special treatment?  Some murky documentation (which the defence exploited to the maximum in the main trial) hinted at conspiracies.   Something unusual was going on here but McKenna never really elucidates what might have spurred the police into quite such elaborate activity (did E Division of the Metropolitan Police have nothing more urgent on its casebooks?).   My suspicion would be that Stella hooking up with Lord Arthur may have been part of the issue.   He was clearly a monumental embarrassment- godson of the Prime Minister Mr Gladstone, briefly MP for Newark (a constituency which doesn’t seem to have much luck with its MPs….), bankrupt and deep in debt (McKenna suggests that Stella was selling her body to keep them financially afloat as a couple) and thoroughly indiscreet about his sexual preferences.   But surely it would have been simpler to bundle him out of the country on a remittance rather than risk a prosecution in which his name was bound to appear prominently (which, if you take the view that his death was faked, is what happened anyway but only after the damage had been done; my guess is that the suspicious aspects of his death were a cover for suicide, a possibility that McKenna doesn’t discuss)?

Similar questions surround the Old Bailey trial.   On the face of it, this saw the full might of the state on display; the Attorney General led for the prosecution, the Lord Chief Justice presided.  As McKenna says, however, at times the prosecution’s heart didn’t seem to be in it.   The Attorney General more or less admitted in his opening speech that the case had been pursued to court at the insistence of the Home Secretary (and by implication against the advice of the Law Officers).   The police had cut no end of corners in assembling their case, searching properties and impounding private property without a warrant. The prosecution witnesses were either deeply unimpressive (a former policemen thrown off the force for misconduct, a rather ineffectual theatre manager) or had shifted their ground in the period since the committal hearings- almost invariably in ways which favoured the accused (McKenna hints they’d been got at by the defence).   Neither Fanny nor Stella took the stand- they were under no legal obligation to- but Stella’s mother was allowed to give a bravura performance in support of her offspring which left hardly a dry eye in the house.  She was never seriously pressed on her convenient memory lapses and the inconsistencies which riddled her account.  Mr Boulton was conveniently out of the country on business. 

It is of course possible that the Attorney General, Sir Robert Collier, was simply a rather poor courtroom performer who managed a problematic case badly.  He wasn’t one of the stars of the Victorian bar, his legal career prior to his appointment had been solid rather than stellar and he would have got the job as much for political services as for legal expertise.    In fairness it was never going to be easy to prove the (rather convoluted) charges.   It was notoriously difficult to make consensual sodomy charges stick unless the parties were either caught in flagrante or one of them was persuaded (or induced) to turn evidence.   This wasn’t going to happen here- which was why the stated charges majored on conspiracy rather than the actual commission of an offence even though this led to some logical absurdities worthy of WS Gilbert. 

Even conspiracy was hard to prove.  Stella and Fanny may have been flamboyant but they were not utterly reckless; they had gone out of their way to inform the rather besotted young man in the box with them at the Strand Theatre of their true gender more than once and he simply didn’t believe them- he was effectively a defence witness when called.  He wasn’t alone; even when they were in male dress they were often taken for women posing as men, to the extent that some contemporary commentators hinted that they might, in today’s parlance, be intersex- a factor further muddying the already murky waters.  For all its horrors, the medical examinations they had been subjected to worked doubly in their favour; firstly as the medical luminaries involved voted five to one that there was no physical evidence of anal sex to be seen on their bodies and secondly because the whole business of examining them was of highly questionable legality and did the prosecution little good.    

Trying to bring sodomy-related charges before a jury in the 1870’s wasn’t quite as straightforward as Victorian stereotypes might imply.  As McKenna notes, there was a seamy side of blackmail and extortion to law enforcement in this area, where corrupt policemen worked hand in glove with male prostitutes to extort cash from men not to pursue fraudulent allegations of sexual assault.   Fanny’s brother Harry (though pretty obviously gay himself) had been the victim of entrapment of this sort and had skipped bail to avoid the courts- tragically he was the main victim of the case, tracked down thanks to his correspondence with Fanny and sentenced to hard labour which killed him.  When arrested, Stella’s first reaction was to offer to pay off the detective involved- whether with money, sexual favours or both is unclear.   The middle aged middle class males who would have made up the Old Bailey jury were no doubt well aware of this context.   They were also, to an extent that McKenna doesn’t entirely recognise, drawn from a social group which in the mid-Victorian age might not have liked “sodomites” but was also highly ambivalent about the assertion of state power to pry into areas of private life (especially the private lives of middle class individuals) and far less convinced of the unique wonderfulness of “our policemen” than their children and grandchildren would become.   They were likely to be every bit as worried about police encroachments on the liberty of the subject as by claims of sodomitical conspiracies.  

A competent defence team could make much of these concerns.  Fanny, Stella and their comrades in the dock were very well defended indeed- to an extent which leads one to wonder who was paying the costs.  It’s suggested that the leading solicitor who orchestrated the defence was acting out of a sense of sympathy for the underdog and that the £5000 plus which must have been involved (add a couple of zeros or more to get a sense of contemporary values) came from one of their friends- but she is later recorded as having died in poverty.  Maybe the drag scene took a whip round to raise the cash (sadly no advertisements for benefit events survive……); possibly some of the barristers (including the wonderfully named Mr Straight QC) took the case out of sympathy with Fanny’s father, a respected judge.    It’s an issue McKenna doesn’t really pursue, perhaps for lack of evidence- but a slightly frustrating gap.

All things considered, the real puzzle is why the Home Secretary insisted on going to trial on such a shaky case.   McKenna at his most florid implies that the prosecution was set up to fail in order to show that the nation was not as undermined by sodomy as some were suggesting.   Put in those terms, this sounds a bit far fetched and depends heavily on taking one of Collier’s rhetorical flourishes out of its wider context.   Bruce’s career doesn’t give many clues.   He was hardly one of the big beasts of the Victorian political jungle; this was the only Cabinet post he ever held as he gave up politics in the mid 1870’s to pursue his business interests.   The only piece of legislation associated with his name was a Licensing Act which made it a great deal harder to obtain a licence to sell alcoholic drinks and piled additional regulation on pubs and bars.  This might suggest a puritan streak- but was very much in line with Gladstonian Liberal attitudes so may not entirely reflect his personal views.  It is of course possible that the puritanism verging on sanctimony integral to Gladstonian Liberalism played a role at political level.  My guess, for what it’s worth, is a subtle variant on McKenna’s view- that Bruce pressed for a trial because simply dropping the case after the initial committal hearing would have been grist to the mill of those in the media dropping dark hints of wide ranging sodomitical conspiracies in high places involving the political and social elites.   Going to trial, even accepting that the case was likely to fail, would at least choke off the wilder allegations of cover ups and conspiracies by allowing justice to be seen to be done.   It may be relevant that the press coverage quoted most by McKenna came from the 1870’s equivalent of the tabloids (the radical, quasi-republican “Reynolds News”, always looking for a stick to beat the aristocracy with, the scandal- oriented “Pall Mall Gazette” etc).  What else was in the papers at the time?   Presumably the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune got some coverage in the period between the original arrest and the trial- what were the major domestic news stories that Fanny and Stella were competing with for headline room?   McKenna doesn’t tell us.  I suspect their case didn’t quite monopolise press coverage for months on end in the way he implies, for all the Victorian love of a meaty courtroom drama.

McKenna does try to follow his characters beyond the trial, though in some cases this proves impossible.   The two stars had somewhat different fates, though both ended up in America.   Fanny, as noted above, died there a few years later of terminal syphilis.  Stella opted for a full time stage career working, ultimately with her brother as accompanist, in a kind of proto-revue act of songs and sketches- though under an assumed stage name as not every press revue was friendly when it came to light that she was the notorious Stella Boulton.  The photo of her in pastoral mode below dates from that period.  The act toured with reasonable success on both sides of the Atlantic until well into the 1890’s; she died in her fifties in 1903.  She never ended up in the courts again, nor does she seem to have located another long term partner, which is a little sad.   For all their over-the-top behaviour and her tantrums, she and Fanny seem to have been enjoyable, life-enhancing, people to know and to have inspired a considerable loyalty from their friends.   Despite its shortcomings McKenna’s book brings them very much back to life.